Romans 8:19 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

For the earnest expectation, &c. “This and the following verses,” says Dr. Doddridge, “have been generally, and not without reason, accounted as difficult as any part of this epistle. This difficulty has perhaps been something increased, by rendering κτισις creation in one clause, and creature in another. To explain it as chiefly referring to the brutal or inanimate creation, is insufferable; since the day of the redemption of our bodies will be attended with the conflagration which will put an end to them. The interpretation, therefore, by which Dr. Whitby and others refer it to the Gentile world, is much preferable to this. But, on the whole, I think it gives a much sublimer and nobler sense, to suppose it a bold prosopopœia, by which, on account of the calamity sin brought and continued on the whole unevangelized world, it is represented as looking out with eager expectation, for such a remedy and relief as the gospel brings; by the prevalence of which human nature would be rescued from vanity and corruption, and inferior creatures from tyranny and abuse. If this be allowed to be the meaning of these three verses, the gradation in the twenty-third will be much more intelligible than on any other scheme that I know.” The paragraph is understood in nearly, if not altogether, the same sense by Locke and Macknight, who advance divers convincing reasons to show that it is the true mode of interpretation; which accordingly is here adopted. The earnest expectation The word αποκαραδοκια, thus rendered, as Mr. Blackwall observes, signifies the lifting of the head and the stretching of the body, as far as possible, to hear and see something very agreeable, or of great importance. It is therefore fitly used here to denote very great earnestness of desire and expectation; of the creature That is, of mankind in general, which the word κτισις, in the language of Paul and of the New Testament, frequently signifies, and especially, says Locke, the Gentile world. See Colossians 1:23; Mark 16:15; compared with Matthew 28:19; waiteth Απεκδεχεται, looketh for, as the same word is translated, Php 3:20); the manifestation Αποκαλυψιν, revelation; of the sons of God That happy time when God shall appear more openly to avow them, and that reproach and distress shall be rolled away, under which they are now disguised and concealed. “Though the Gentiles in particular knew nothing of the revelation of the sons of God, the apostle calls their looking for a resurrection from the dead, a looking for that revelation; because the sons of God are to be revealed, by their being raised with incorruptible and immortal bodies. Further, it is here insinuated that the pious Gentiles comforted themselves under the miseries of life, by that hope of immortality, and of the resurrection, which they entertained. At the fall, God declared his purpose of rendering the malice of the devil, in bringing death on the human species, ineffectual, and therefore gave mankind not only the hope of a future life, but of the resurrection of the body, as the apostle intimates, Romans 8:21. And that hope, preserved in the world by tradition, may have been the foundation of the earnest desire of the Gentiles here taken notice of.” Macknight. Or rather the passage, as Doddridge observes, is to be considered as a prosopopœia, as is observed on Romans 8:19.